AHMEDABAD: After lagging for years, India has now taken a lead in the business of ideas. Over 50% of total patents filed for industrial innovations in the US have Indian brains behind them, says a study by Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A ).

Foreign firms, including research and development (R&D ) centres, have increased their dependence on all-Indians teams - a trend reflected in the number of Indian inventors in patent applications filed by foreign companies in India and abroad in recent years.

The study 'Foreign R&D Centres in India: An Analysis of their Size, Structure and Implications' measures the contribution of multinational companies in the generation of innovations from India . The trend suggests maturing of Indian researchers and the fact that local researchers are the most important sources of ideas for R&D projects for foreign companies in India, according to the study.

The authors, IIM-A faculty Rakesh Basant, along with Sunil Mani from the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum , conducted a survey on a sample of 120 MNC R&D firms, the bulk of which were set up after 1990.

The study also says foreign R&D centres seem to have become the locus for creating 'reverse innovations' , which means innovations that are first created in India by these centres and then exported back to their parent firms for use both in developed and developing country markets.

Majority of the R&D centres are either subsidiaries or branches of US-based MNCs and one industry where they are extremely active is the ICT sector. "Over time, 50-66 % of the total US patenting of industrial innovations are recorded in India, conducted through these centres," says the study.

According to private estimates , the number of foreign R&Ds operating in India till December 2011 was about 900. The R&D expenditures by foreign companies have shown a robust increase from Rs 286 crore in 2002-03 to Rs 2883 crore in 2009-10 . Moreover, the share of foreign companies in total R&D has increased to around 20 per cent according to the most recently available estimates, says the study.

Finally, the study suggests that in order to get spill-over benefits of MNC R&D activities in India, R&D policy should be enhanced. "India does not have any explicit policies to promote FDI in R&D although there exists in the country a number of policy instruments, fiscal and otherwise , for promoting FDI and incentivising the conduct of R&D ," the study says.